


Compartmentalising

by deathishauntedbyhumans



Series: Whose Life Is It Anyways [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Internal Monologue, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:22:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22919887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathishauntedbyhumans/pseuds/deathishauntedbyhumans
Summary: So Cody does what he’s found himself doing again and again since waking without his memories the previous morning: he compartmentalises.
Series: Whose Life Is It Anyways [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647334





	Compartmentalising

Putting up a tent and laying out three sleeping bags and a tarp (not necessarily in that order) is an easier task than it sounds when five able bodies are set to it. None of them say much while they work; there’s an occasional  _ thanks  _ from Theo, and Cody has to discourage Myra from causing Jason any more bodily harm more than once, but beyond that, the air is filled only with the sound of rain falling against the ground and leaves crunching beneath their feet. So Cody does what he’s found himself doing again and again since waking without his memories the previous morning: he compartmentalises. 

The thought of the files in his briefcase fills him with the same acrid dread it had before, so Cody glosses over it quickly. (There hadn’t been much information in them, anyways, so it doesn’t take him long to move past it.) A knot of anxiety tugs insistently at his stomach at the recent memory of waking up in the dark, in the unfamiliar room Theo had allowed him to use. 

He dreads the coming night. There isn’t anything that he can do to stop it from creeping up on them, and there’s nowhere else that’s safer for them to be, but  _ God,  _ he wishes he’d thought to bring a second tent. He doubts, somehow, that the rest of his companions will allow his strange habit of sleeping in light to go without comment… or even if they will allow it to happen at all. And he knows, too, that they  _ should  _ conserve as much power as they can in the lanterns he’d taken from Theo’s house. 

That doesn’t mean, however, that he has to like it. 

Cody hammers a stake into the ground with the end of Theo’s baseball bat. The electrical box had been broken with a large stick. The stick had been contaminated with strange green fibers… strange green fibers, it had seemed, that nobody else had noticed. 

He files the information neatly away in his head. There had been knocking at the door. Gary first, to check the electrical box, and then Gary and “Jason.” “Jason,” or William Kiemlin, who was likely now no more than a pile of ashes beneath a blazing house fire. 

As much as Kiemlin might have deserved to die, Cody still feels a stab of frustration lance through him for it. He’d been aiming for the thug’s shoulder, damn him, not his fucking neck. But no, he’d moved, and Cody hadn’t been able to get a drop of information out of him before he’d died. He’d probably died instantly, actually, if the amount of bleeding and the scope of the wound were any indication. Fucking idiot. 

Jason sticks his tongue out at Myra from across their makeshift campsite, as though punctuating Cody’s thought. Cody levels Myra with a look to attempt to keep her from retaliating physically. She sticks her tongue out at Cody and then turns it on Jason instead. 

They’d tied Gary up, he’d gone through Kiemlan’s pockets. They’d gone out to the electrician’s van parked out front. Myra had beaten Jason to a pulp. Jason had been confused, disoriented. He’d shown ID. Cody had climbed into the car, past Jason and a Toni whose shirt had somehow vanished —maybe it was another new superpower— and had discovered the second dead body of the day. 

A man, with a bullet-hole in his forehead and drying blood coating his head and much of the floor. Identified by a license as Malik Stamler, another employee of Dartlow Plant. He’d been a young man— old man? No, he’d had slender features and— no, a young face, very masculine— feminine features, short hair— long hair, longer than it should have been—

With a calm that he doesn’t feel, Cody informs Theo and Toni, who are standing side-by-side, that he’s going to take a piss, and wastes no time after in walking a short distance away from their newly-made camp. He takes a handful of careful, measured breaths, and examines a tree with a crude eye before determining it safe. Instead of unbuttoning his fly, however, he merely leans against the rough bark with one arm against the trunk and his forehead pressed tightly into his arm. 

It’s cold. The rain is in his hair, on his clothes, in his eyes. It’s drowning him, and it feels like something is stealing the oxygen from the very air around him. 

He knows it isn’t real, can feel the chill of the Pacific Northwestern wind against his cheeks, but he feels himself back in the van, too. He steps past Jason with ease, barely glancing at Toni, and reaches for the body in the corner that Myra has already identified as dead. 

He reaches forward, and he isn’t Cody anymore. 

A man whose name he can’t remember stares lifelessly up at Russ, his thin form too easy to manipulate. Russ curls his fingers gently behind the stranger-but-not’s head to keep his neck from straining. The man doesn’t blink. Something inside of Russ cracks; a dam is about to break. 

Cody takes a huge breath and stumbles backwards. When he catches himself against the trunk of another tree, he has to hold it tightly to keep his hands from shaking. Whatever that was,  _ who _ ever that was… It doesn’t matter now. It can’t matter now. 

His chest aches. He rubs it without thinking, digging the tips of his fingers in hard against the bone. It’s a good sensation. It grounds him. 

“Everything is fine,” Cody says to himself out loud, the words no more than a low growl. His voice is mostly drowned out by the sound of raindrops hitting leaves, but it’s enough to help him to take another deep breath and stand up straight again. 

When his fingers return to their current normal —cold and a little numb, but not trembling— Cody rubs one hand over his face and then throws his shoulders back. It doesn’t take hun longer than a few minutes to reorient himself with reality, and once he manages, he walks back to their campsite, and he compartmentalises. 

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos/comments are love! Come scream at me on tumblr @deathishauntedbyhumans.


End file.
